12 simple technologies for cities that are Smart, open and fair

(Fritz Lang’s 1927 dystopian film Metropolis pictured a city that exploited futuristic technologies, but only on behalf of a minority of its citizens. Image by Breve Storia del Cinema)

Efficiency; resilience; growth; vitality. These are all characteristics that cities desire, and that are regularly cited as the objectives of Smarter City programmes and other forward-looking initiatives.

But, though it is less frequently stated, a more fundamental objective underlies all of these: fairness.

I think the Smart Cities movement will only be viewed as a success by the wider world if it contributes to redressing that imbalance.

So how do we design Smart City systems that employ technology to make cities more successful, resilient and efficient; in a way that distributes resources and creates opportunities more fairly than today?

One answer to that question is that the infrastructures and institutions of such cities should be open to citizens and businesses: accessible, understandable, adaptable and useful.

Why do we need open cities?

In the wonderful “Walkable City“, Jeff Speck describe’s the epidemiologist Richard Jackson’s stark realisation of the life-and-death significance of good urban design. Jackson was driving along a notorious 2 mile stretch of Atlanta’s 7-lane Buford highway with no pavements or junctions:

There, by the side of the road, in the ninety-five degree afternoon, he saw a woman in her seventies, struggling under the burden of two shopping bags. He tried to relate her plight to his own work as an epidemiologist. “If that poor woman had collapsed from heat stroke, we docs would have written the cause of death as heat stroke and not lack of trees and public transportation, poor urban form, and heat-island effects. If she had been killed by a truck going by the cause of death would have been “motor vehicle trauma”, and not lack of sidewalks and transit, poor urban planning and failed political leadership.”

(Pedestrian’s attempting to cross Atlanta’s notorious Buford Highway; a 7-lane road with no pavements and 2 miles between junctions and crossings. Photo by PBS)

Buford Highway is an infrastructure fit only for vehicles, not for people. It allows no safe access along or across it for the communities it passes through – it is closed to them, unless they risk their lives.

One of the technology industry’s most notorious failures, the Greyhound Lines bus company’s 1993 “Trips” reservations system, made a city service – bus transport – unusable. The system was intended to make it quicker and easier for ticket agents to book customers onto Greyhound’s buses. But it was so poorly designed and operated so slowly that passengers missed their buses whilst they stood in line waiting for their tickets; were separated from their luggage; and in some cases were stranded overnight in bus terminals.

In the 21st Century, badly applied digital technology will create bad cities, just as badly designed roads and buildings did in the last century.

(The SMS for Life project uses the cheap and widely used SMS infrastructure to create a dynamic, collaborative supply chain for medicines between pharmacies in Africa. Photo by Novartis AG)

Smart Cities for the digitally disconnected

It’s possible to benefit from Smart city infrastructures without being connected to the internet or having skills in digital technology – Stockholm’s road-use charging scheme reduces congestion and pollution for everyone in the city, for example.

But the benefits of many Smart systems are dependent on being connected to the internet and having the skills to use it. From the wealth of educational material now available online (from the most sophisticated Harvard University courses to the most basic tutorials on just about any subject available on YouTube), to the increasing role of technology in high-paid careers, it’s absolutely obvious that the ability to access and use the internet and digital technologies in the future will be a crucial component of a successful life.

Smart cities won’t be fair cities if we take connectivity and skills for granted. Worldwide, fully one-third of the population has never been online; and even in as rich and advanced a country as the United Kingdom, 18% of adults – a fifth of the voting population – have never used the internet. At the risk of generalising a complex issue, many of those people will be those that Smart City services should create benefits for if they are to contribute to making cities fairer.

There’s been a lot of discussion of “net neutrality” recently – the principle that on the Internet, all traffic is equal, and that there is no way to pay for certain data to be treated preferentially. The principle is intended to ensure that the benefits of the internet are equally available to everyone.

But net neutrality is irrelevant to those who can’t access the internet at all; and the free market is already bypassing it in some ways. Network providers who control the local infrastructures that connect homes and businesses to the internet are free to charge higher prices for faster connections. Wealthy corporations and governments can bypass parts of the internet entirely with their own international cable networks through which they can route traffic between users on one continent and content on another.

The UK’s Government Digital Service employ an excellent set of agile, user-centric design principles that are intended to promote the development of Smarter, digitally-enabled services that can be accessed by anyone anywhere who needs them, regardless of their level of skill with digital technology or ability to access the Internet.

The principles include: “Start with needs”; “Do the hard work to make it simple”; “Build for inclusion”; “Understand context”; and “Build digital services, not websites”.

A good example of following these principles and designing excellent, accessible digital services using common sense is the London Borough of Newham. By concentrating on the delivery of services through mobile telephones – which are much more widely owned than PCs and laptops – and on contexts in which a friend or family member assists the ultimate service user, Newham have achieved a remarkable shift to online services in one of London’s least affluent boroughs, home to many communities and citizens without access to broadband connectivity or traditional computers.

Similar, low-tech innovations in designing systems that people find useful can be found in some smart meter deployments.

In Kenya, Kilimo Salama has made crop insurance affordable for subsistence farmers by using remote weather monitoring to trigger payouts via Safaricom’s M-Pesa mobile payments service, rather than undertaking expensive site visits to assess claims. And the SMS for Life project in Tanzania uses the cheap and widely used SMS infrastructure to create a dynamic, collaborative supply chain for medicine between rural pharmacists.

Schumacher’s views on technology were informed by his belief that our approach to economics should be transformed “as if people mattered”. He asked:

What happens if we create economics not on the basis of maximising the production of goods and the ability to acquire and consume them – which ends up valuing automation and profit – but on the Buddhist definition of the purpose of work: “to give a man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence.”

Schumacher pointed out that the most advanced technologies, to which we often look to create value and growth, are in fact only effective in the hands of those with the resources and skills required to use them- i.e. those who are already wealthy; and that by emphasising efficiency, output and profit they tend to further concentrate economic value in the hands of the wealthy – often specifically by reducing the employment of people with less advanced skills and roles.

In contrast, Schumacher felt that the most genuine “development ” of our society would occur when the most possible people were employed in a way that gave them the practical ability to earn a living ; and that also offered a level of human reward – much as Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” first identifies our most basic requirements for food, water, shelter and security; but next relates the importance of family, friends and “self-actualisation” (which can crudely be described as the process of achieving things that we care about).

This led him to ask:

What is that we really require from the scientists and technologists? I should answer:

I can’t think of a more powerful set of tools that reflect these characteristics than the digital technologies that have emerged over the past decade, such as social media, smartphones, Cloud computing and Open Data. They provide a digital infrastructure of appropriate technologies that are accessible to everyone, but that connect with the large scale city infrastructures that support millions of urban lives; and they give citizens, communities and businesses the ability to adapt city infrastructures to their own needs.

I can think of at least 12 such technologies that are particularly important; and that fall into the categories of “Infrastructures that matter”; “Technologies for everyone”; and “The keys to the city”.

Infrastructures that matter

1.Broadband connectivity

I’ve covered the importance of broadband connectivity, and the challenges involved in providing it ubiquitously, already, so I won’t go into detail again here. But whether it’s fixed-line, mobile or wi-fi, its benefits are becoming so significant that it can’t be omitted.

2. Cloud computing

Before Cloud computing, anyone who wanted to develop a computing system for others to use had to invest up-front in an infrastructure capable of operating the service to a reasonable level of reliability. Cloud computing provides a much easier, cheaper alternative: rent a little bit of someone else’s infrastructure. And if your service becomes popular, don’t worry about carrying out complex and costly upgrades, just rent a little more.

Cloud computing has helped to democratise digital services by making it it dramatically easier and cheaper for anyone to create and offer them.

In the developed world, we’re conscious of the increasing power of Smartphones; and Councils such as Newham are exploiting the fact that many people who lack the desire or resources to purchase a computer and a broadband connection possess and use relatively sophisticated Smartphones through which they access digital services and content.

In his 2011 book “Civilization“, Niall Fergusson comments that news of the Indian Mutiny in 1857 took 46 days to reach London, travelling in effect at 3.8 miles an hour. By Jan 2009 when US Airways flight 1549 crash landed in the Hudson river, Jim Hanrahan’s message on Twitter communicated the news to the entire world four minutes later; it reached Perth, Australia at more than 170,000 miles an hour.

The “Community Lovers Guide“, of which 60 editions have now been published across the world, contains stories of people and projects that have improved their communities. The guide is not concerned directly with technology; but many of the initiatives that it describes have used social media as a tool for engaging with stakeholders and supporters.

And we increasingly use social media to conduct business. From e-Bay to Uber, social media is being used to create “sharing economy” business models that replace traditional sales channels and supply chains with networks of peer-to-peer transactions in industries from financial services to agriculture to distribution to retail. Nearly 2 billion of us now regularly use the technologies that allow us to participate in those trading networks.

Three years ago, I watched my then 2-year-old son teach himself how to use a touchscreen tablet to watch cartoons from around the world. He is a member of the first generation to grow up with the world’s information literally at their fingertips before they can read and write.

The simplicity of the touchscreen has already led to the adoption of tablet computers by huge numbers of people who would never have so willingly chosen to use a laptop computer and keyboard. As touchscreens and the devices that use them become cheaper and cheaper, many more people who currently don’t choose to access online content and services will do so without realising it, simply by interacting with the world around them.

Open Source software is one of the very few technologies that is free in principle to anyone with the time to understand how to use it. It is not free in the medium or long-term – most organisations that use it pay for some form of support or maintenance to be carried out on their Open Source systems. But it is free to get started, and the Open Source community is a great place to get help and advice whilst doing so.

My colleagues around the world work very hard to ensure that IBM’s technologies support open source technology, from interoperating with the MySQL database and CKAN open data portal; to donating IBM-developed technologies such as Eclipse, MQTT and Node-RED to the Open Source community; to IBM’s new “BlueMix” Cloud computing platform for developers which is built from Open Source technology and offers developers 50 pre-built services for inclusion in their Apps, many of which are open source.

Not all technology is Open Source, and there are good reasons why many technology companies large and small invest in developing products and services for cities that use proprietary software – often, simply to protect their investment. For as long as those products and services offer valuable capabilities that are not available as open source software, cities will use them.

But it is vital that city systems incorporating those technologies are nevertheless open for use by open source software, simply to make them as widely accessible as possible for people who need to adapt them to their own needs.

7. Intelligent hardware

The emergence of the internet as a platform for enabling sales, marketing and logistics over the last decade has enabled small and micro-businesses to reach markets across the world that were previously accessible only to much larger organisations with international sales and distribution networks.

An “API” is an “Application Programming Interface“: it is a tool that allows one computer system – such as an Open Source “app” written by an entrepreneur or social innovator – to use the information and capabilities of another computer system – such as a traffic information system for a city’s transport network.

A Smarter City infrastructure whose IT systems offer APIs to citizens, communities and businesses can be accessed and adapted by them. It is the very opposite of Atlanta’s Buford Highway.

(The UK’s Open Data Institute’s 2013 Summit. The ODI promotes open data in the UK and shares best practise internationally. Photo by the ODI)

9. Open Data

The Open Data movement champions the principle that any non-sensitive data from public services and infrastructures should be freely and openly available. Most such data is not currently available in this form – either because the organisations operating those services have yet to adopt the principle, or because the computer systems they use simply were not designed to make data available.

The “Dublinked” information sharing partnership, in which Dublin City Council, three surrounding local authorities and service providers to the city share information and make it available to their communities as “open data”, is a good example of the benefits that openness can bring. Dublinked now makes 3,000 datasets available to local authority analysts; to researchers from IBM Research and the National University of Ireland; and to businesses, entrepreneurs and citizens. The partnership is identifying new ways for the city’s public services and transport, energy and water systems to work; and enabling the formation of new, information-based businesses with the potential to export the solutions they develop in Dublin to cities internationally. It is putting the power of technology and of city information not only at the disposal of the city authority and its agencies, but also into the hands of communities and innovators.

10. Open Standards

Open Data and Open APIs will only be widely used and effective in cities across the world if they conform to Open Standards that mean that everyone, everywhere can use them in the same way.

In order to do something as simple as changing a lightbulb, we rely on open standards for the levels of voltage and power from our electricity supply; the physical dimensions of the socket and bulb and the characteristics of their fastenings; specifications of the bulb’s light and heat output; and the tolerance of the bulb and the fitting for the levels of moisture found in bathrooms and kitchens. Cities are much more complicated than lightbulbs; and many more standards will be required on order for us to connect to and re-configure their systems easily and reliably.

Open standards are also an important tool in avoiding city systems becoming “locked-in” to any particular supplier. By specifying common characteristics that all systems are required to demonstrate, it becomes more straightforward to exchange one supplier’s implementation for another.

Local trading systems use paper or electronic currencies that are issued and accepted within a particular place or region. They influence people and businesses to spend the money that they earn locally, thereby promoting regional economic synergies.

Examples include the Bristol Pound; the Droplet smartphone payment scheme in Birmingham; and schemes based on the bartering of goods, money, time and services, such as time banking. Some schemes combine both elements – in Switzerland, a complementary currency, the Wir , has contributed to economic stability over the last century by allowing some debt repayments to be bartered locally when they cannot be repaid in universal currency.

As these schemes develop – and in particular as they adopt technologies such as smartphones and Open APIs – they are increasingly being used as an infrastructure for Smarter City projects in domains such as transport, food supply and energy.

Smarter Cities will succeed at scale when we discover the business models that convert financial payments and investments into social, economic and environmental improvements in the places where we live and work. I can’t think of a more directly applicable tool for designing those business models than flexible, locally focussed currencies and payment infrastructures.

12. Identity stores

In order to use digital services, we have to provide personal information online. What happens to that personal information once we have finished using the service?

Our use of technologies such as social media, Smartphones and APIs creates a mass of data about us that is often retained by the operators of the services we use. Sometimes this is as a result of deliberate actions: when we share geo-tagged photos through social media, for example. In other cases, it is incidental. The location and movement of GPS sensors in our smartphones is anonymised by our network providers and aggregated with that of others nearby who are moving similarly. It is then sold to traffic information services, so that they can sell it back to us through the satellite navigation systems in our cars to help us to avoid traffic congestion.

Organisations of all types and sizes are competing for the new markets and opportunities of the information economy that are created, in part, by this increased availability of personal information. That is simply the natural consequence of the emergence of a new resource in a competitive economy. But it is also true that as the originators of much of that information, and as the ultimate stakeholders in that economy, we should seek to establish an equitable consensus between us for how our information is used.

A different approach is being taken by organisations such as MyDex. MyDex are a Community Interest Company (CIC) who have created a platform that allows users to securely share personal information with digital service providers when they need to; but to revoke access when they have finished using the service.

Incorporation as a Community Interest Company allows MyDex:

“… to be sustainable and requires it be run for community benefit. Crucially, the CIC assets and the majority of any profits must be used for the community purposes for which Mydex is established. Its assets cannot be acquired by another party to which such restrictions do not apply.”

As a result of both the security of their technology solution and the clarity with which personal and community interests are reflected in their business model, MyDex’s platform is now being used by a variety of public sector and community organisations to offer a personal data store to the people they support.

MyDex’s approach to creating trust in the use of personal data is not the only one, but it is a good example of a business model that explicitly addresses and prioritises the interests of the individual.

Architects and city planners such as Kelvin Campbell, founder of the Smart Urbanism movement and Jan Gehl, who inspired the “human-scale cities” movement have been identifying the fine-grained physical characteristics of large-scale urban environments that encourage vibrant communities and successful economies through the daily activities of people, families, communities and businesses.

Smarter cities will not be fairer cities unless we identify and employ technologies for building them that create similar openness and accessibility for digital services and information. That’s precisely what I think Open Data, mobile phones, virtual currencies and the other technologies I’ve described in this article can achieve.

I can’t think of a more exciting idea than using them to address the economic, social and environmental challenge of our time and to build better cities and communities for tomorrow.

About Rick RobinsonI’m the UK, Middle East and Africa leader of the Digital Cities and Property business for Arup, the independent design and engineering company. Previously, I was Director of Technology for Amey, one of the UK’s largest engineering and infrastructure services companies, part of the international Ferrovial Group, and before that IBM UK’s Executive Architect for Smarter Cities.

12 Responses to 12 simple technologies for cities that are Smart, open and fair

Rick: Great post, as usual. I think the challenge here is going to be in the digital infrastructure, assuming that we do have decent broadband coverage.

Assembling all these technologies into some semblance of an integrated system will be difficult without some guidelines – IMHO, Enterprise Architecture and its constitutent parts: Business Architecture, Software Architecture (to include Data Architecture) and Infrastructure (Technology) Architecture. We suffer today from the organic evolution of IT within current (ancient) governance models. I assert the OpenData movement came into being primarily due to citizen frustration with data trapped in silos and the fundamental inability of government organizations to work across silos to deliver services.

A recent article on Planetizen discussed how to use the emerging “Science of Cities” to help planners design or enable a better physical environment for a Smarter City (http://www.planetizen.com/node/69957). The points were made that cities are partially decentralized and partially generated by self-organizing agents and that cities are both simultaneously scale-free and scale-dependent. In these ways, cities are “fractal” entities.

I think the technologies for a Smarter City need to reflect this fractal nature. To borrow an analogy from the article, we need a tree-like structure – an expansive root system, a solid trunk, sturdy branches, twigs and leaves. The larger, more common structures (roots, trunk, branches) should be a designed framework that allows for more co-creation at the edges (smaller branches, twigs and leaves).

Another good example from biology is the human brain. We have learned much more about its neurophysiology of late…its physical structure reminds me of a lattice or matrix – the same structure is created if you take a 3D Enterprise Architecture abstraction (think about an assembly of cubes) and look at the interstitial lines, not the cubes themselves (more on this later).

I agree that these 12 technologies are key, but the ultimate success or failure of a city or region to get smarter will be in how they are assembled and shared.

I spent a long time whilst writing the article about whether to include a 13th technology: Open Architectures; and I think you’ve made a good argument that I should have done so! One of the roles of Open Architectures is to clearly and transparently identify what data (e.g. personal information about citizens) is required to support what purpose (e.g. levying fair taxes; providing social care) in order that sensible decisions can be taken about data that should be made open versus protected.

That’s a great article on Planetizen, and I was delighted to find out at the end that it’s author was Michael Mehaffy with whom I’ve had several discussions of design patterns in Smart Cities – Michael’s working on some really interesting ideas with Ward Cunningham – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6pX0S34CZk . Michael and I started talking precisely because we’d both spotted the links between the design of urban spaces and systems to promote creative transactions between people; the increasing role of technology in supporting or enabling those transactions; and the discipline of interface design in software engineering.

These 12 technologies and my previous article “6 ways to design humanity and localism into Smart Cities” are two attempts I’ve made to contribute to mapping out that intersection in more detail; but they’re certainly not as rigorous as the “science of cities” idea, though on reflection they do refer to systems at different scales.

I get a sense there’s a body of material beginning to coalesce here that could be as formative to the next phase of urban development as Christopher Alexander’s design patterns were in town planning 40 years ago and later in the Software industry in the 1980s,

Thank you for these insights. When you consider new cities, considering how homes are evolving is key to get an accurate picture. As a member of IBM I am sure you know the impact of new connected kitchens and iniatives like Dash by Amazon and how homes will be more central to key functions: schooling, selling, healing… Happy to connect on these matters.

Eduard, that’s a great point about location technology; it makes me think I should also add the widespread availability and usability of mapping services. If anyone points out other good candidates to include, or if I think of a few others myself, I’ll post an update.

Rick Robinson

I’m the UK, Middle East and Africa leader of the Digital Cities and Property business for Arup, the independent design and engineering company. Previously, I was Director of Technology for Amey, one of the UK’s largest engineering and infrastructure services companies, part of the international Ferrovial Group, and before that IBM UK’s Executive Architect for Smarter Cities. I’m the founder and the current chair of the Birmingham Smart City Alliance, a non-Executive Director of Innovation Birmingham and a member of the Board of the West Midlands Innovation Alliance. You can find out more about my work on the “Personal Profile” page.

You can connect to me on Twitter as @dr_rick; or contact me through Linked-In where I’ll respond to connection requests from people I know, or that are accompanied by a message that starts a meaningful discussion.

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